Welcome to the Saucy Salamander edition of Xubuntu, an open source distribution of Linux derived from the Ubuntu operating system, but using the lightweight Xfce desktop environment in order to support a wider range of computers, especially the ones with no more than 512MB of RAM.

Still available for download as Live DVDs

This Xubuntu release was officially announced by Canonical on October 17, 2013 and it will be supported with software updates and security patches until July 2014. It can be downloaded as two Live DVD ISO images, one for each of the supported hardware platforms (64-bit and 32-bit).

The boot menu is unchanged from previous Xubuntu releases, allowing the user to try the OS without installing it, boot an existing operating system from the first disk drive, test the computer's memory for errors, check the disc for defects (only if using a DVD media), and directly install the distribution.

Still using that dark/white theme

It looks like Canonical does not want to listen to its users, as it still uses the same ugly dark/white theme for the graphical interface, which is powered by the latest stable version of the Xfce desktop environment. It tried to mask its ugliness with a dark blue gradient wallpaper.

The software collection is unchanged, which is a good thing! The default web browser is Mozilla Firefox, users can send emails and view the latest news with the Mozilla Thunderbird app, listen to music with gmusicbrowser, view movies with Parole media player, edit word documents with AbiWord and spreadsheet files with Gnumeric, edit images with GIMP and view them with gThumb or Ristretto.

Bottom line

In conclusion, Xubuntu 13.10 is a decent operating system that uses the latest Xfce and Ubuntu technologies, as well as a great collection of applications. It is still the perfect Linux distribution for computers with old and semi-old hardware components.